Reply #23: some history on Gates [View All]

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
A CIA insider's take on Gates
BY RAY MCGOVERN

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/16158060.htm

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The Armed Services Committee's ranking member, Carl Levin, D-Mich., who voted against Gates' nomination in 1991 to be director of the CIA, said he wanted to give Gates a ''fresh look; a lot of time has passed.'' Well, highly damaging evidence has come to light since 1991, implicating Gates in some of the most serious national-security scandals of the 1980s. Veteran investigative reporter Robert Parry, for one, has been providing chapter and verse on Consortiumnews.com.

For example, in January 1995, Howard Teicher, who served on President Reagan's National Security Council staff, submitted a sworn affidavit detailing the activities of Gates and his then-boss, CIA Director William Casey, in secretly providing arms to Iraq. This violated the Arms Export Control Act in two ways: ignoring the requirement to notify Congress; and providing arms to a state designated as a sponsor of terrorism.

It gets worse. To grease the skids for this dubious adventure, Gates ordered his more malleable subordinates at the CIA to cook up intelligence reports to provide some comfort to Reagan in acquiescing to these activities. A National Intelligence Estimate of May 1985 predicted Soviet inroads in Iran if the United States did not reach out to ''moderates'' within the Iranian leadership.

In addition, Gates' analysts were pressed to publish several reports beginning in late 1985 -- as HAWK anti-aircraft missiles wended their way to Tehran -- that Iranian-sponsored terrorism had ''dropped off substantially.'' There was no persuasive evidence to support that judgment.